The moment that you’ve all been waiting for has come, the October 2012 drop of the Windows Azure Training Kit has been released! This release is rather significant and I’ll get into the details in a few minutes, but first I wanted to call out the Windows Azure Training Kit page on WindowsAzure.com.

Special Thanks to the WindowsAzure.com team for updating the Windows Azure Training Kit page.

What’s new in this Release?

The October 2012 update of the Windows Azure Training Kit includes 47 hands-on labs, 24 demos and 38presentations designed to help you learn how to build applications that use Windows Azure services. The October update includes updated hands-on labs to use the latest version of Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8, new demos and presentations.

Presentations

We received a lot of requests to add speaker notes in the slide presentations. I’m happy to announce that we have included speaker notes necessary to support the majority of sessions in the Agendas which are outlined on the Agendas section. The following presentations have speaker notes to aid you in delivering a session:

Hands-on Labs

September marked the launch of Visual Studio 2012 RTM. How do we ring in this celebration? We’ve converted a number of Hands-on Labs to support Visual Studio 2012. In addition to this, we wanted to ensure that you were properly supported for running community events, so we have ensured that the Hands-on Labs will work with Visual Studio 2012 Express Editions just incase you or your audience do not have a license.

New Labs page Layout

As the number of labs has increased, we wanted to provide a nice simple way of discovering the provided hands-on labs. The page is divided now into VS2012, VS2010, Open Source, Scenario, and All [which is the classic layout with the ability to Navigate by Service.]

Demos

You may not have noticed in the August 2012 REFRESH but we shipped a few demos. You might not have noticed this because we didn’t have a navigation page for you to browse them, they were just sitting around on your hard drive if you were adventurous enough to check.

We’ve added a landing page now which will help you navigate and discover the demos which we have packaged for use with the presentations.

Contribute

One of the nicest things about the Windows Azure Training Kit is that it is open source and available on GitHub. This enables you in the community to Report Issues or Fork and either extend the solution or commit bug fixes back to the Training Kit.

You can find out more details about the training kit from our GitHub Page including guidelines on how to commit back to the project.